Without a 4-y college diploma, it is increasingly difficult to build a meaningful and successful life in the United States. We explore what the BA divide has done to longevity, focusing on a measure of expected years lived between ages 25 and 75. In the richest large country in the world, with frontier medical technology, expected years lived between 25 and 75 declined for most of a decade for men and women without a 4-y degree, even prior to the arrival of COVID-19. For those with and without a BA, racial divides narrowed by 70% between 1990 and 2018, while educational divides more than doubled for both Black and White people.
